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<\/picture>\n <\/div>\n\n Illustration: Hokyoung Kim<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n This article was featured in One Great Story<\/a>, New York<\/em>\u2019s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here<\/a> to get it nightly.<\/p>\n Kate was gardening<\/strong> in the front yard of her San Jose bungalow when her new boarder arrived in an Uber from the airport. It was the summer of 2019, a few weeks before classes were set to begin at nearby Santa Clara University. A friend who worked there had asked if she would rent out her guest room to a new adjunct sociology professor. Kate had Googled the name \u2014 Dr. Gary Maynard \u2014 and found his academic profile impressive. \u201cHe\u2019s good-looking,\u201d she says. \u201cThat didn\u2019t hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n Maynard, wearing a preppy polo and tattered sneakers, stepped out of the car with a heavy book bag. He was 45 with a lanky build, floppy hair, and a shambling demeanor. Kate showed her new roommate around the house. He seemed twitchy and anxious, and he left after just a few minutes, mumbling something about researching homelessness in San Francisco. Maynard didn\u2019t return until the next day. \u201cHe just disappeared,\u201d Kate says. \u201cIt was a little odd.\u201d Coming from a sociologist, it was a surprisingly antisocial introduction, but Kate wrote it off as eccentricity \u2014 maybe it was to be expected from a professor. She figured that Santa Clara, where tuition runs to over $56,000 a year, would have done its homework on anyone it hired. The university had given Maynard a one-year contract to teach a variety of subjects, including the cultural effects of technology, organizational diversity, and the sociology of crime.<\/p>\n Kate, who is in her mid-50s, found she enjoyed Maynard\u2019s company once he settled in. She worked as a court reporter, transcribing depositions all day, and was going through a divorce. (She asked to be identified by her first name only.) At dinner, she would pull a bottle from her wine rack. Maynard didn\u2019t drink much, but he smoked weed. Besides his Ph.D. in sociology, he had master\u2019s degrees in political science and theater history. \u201cHe has an air of authority,\u201d Kate says. \u201cIt is a sight to behold.\u201d He studied social deviance and was interested in cults, conspiracy theories, and the paranormal. He was rapturous about nature and spoke of his empathic connection to trees. They commiserated about their hatred of Donald Trump, going deep down all the resistance rabbit holes. \u201cWe would sit across the table and talk for hours,\u201d Kate says. \u201cI was just soaking it in.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of Maynard\u2019s work was related to the dynamics of life at the margins of society. His interest in precarity, to use the trendy academic term, wasn\u2019t just intellectual. As an adjunct, he was what is known as a contingent faculty member: a journeyman, moving from job to job, earning as little as a few thousand dollars per course at whatever institution needed a teacher to fill in for a semester or two. By the standards of the industry, though, he thought his situation at Santa Clara was pretty sweet. \u201cMy days there were a dream,\u201d Maynard later recalled. He would pick mandarins from a tree in Kate\u2019s yard and bike to the campus, which was built around an old Spanish mission. The department chair treated him with respect, giving him a shared office that looked onto a tree-lined quad. His students were engaged, and he said he found the classroom atmosphere \u201cintellectually intoxicating.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Maynard in 2021.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At Thanksgiving, Maynard had no place to go, so Kate invited him to celebrate with one of her friends. He spent a curious amount of time talking about the bloodlines of the British royal family. Kate drank too much. Maynard brought her home, drew a bath, and put her to bed. After that, the relationship turned romantic. Kate was still reeling from her divorce. \u201cWe were two lonely, hurt people that had found each other, right?\u201d she says. \u201cIt was so thrilling.\u201d<\/p>\n Kate got Maynard to try yoga. They lit candles around the tub and took long baths together. They would go out and do role-play, pretending to meet as strangers at a hotel bar. Like many in his field, Maynard was influenced by the sociologist Erving Goffman, who saw all the world as a stage on which people behave like actors, hiding their true selves behind masks. With Kate, Maynard let his mask slip. He confided that his life had been full of struggle and hurt. He said that he had an autism-spectrum disorder and that workplace relations were an ordeal. He would agonize for days before departmental meetings, gaming out where to sit and how to avoid notice.<\/p>\n That spring, the pandemic caused Santa Clara to shut its campus and shift classes online. At first, that wasn\u2019t so bad for someone who craved isolation, but new stresses soon emerged. Kate could hear Maynard yelling to himself as he doomscrolled the news. In May, she returned from a vacation to discover Maynard had set up surveillance cameras inside her house. He turned inward, sealing himself up in his room, covering the windows to block the sun.<\/p>\n Then, that angry summer, California began to burn. The West was experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years, with ideal conditions for wildfires. Flames consumed more than 4 million acres, an area half the size of Belgium. The sky over Kate\u2019s house was dark during the day and glowed orange at night. It was as if the mind smoldering inside her spare room had taken on metaphysical form.<\/p>\n Kate begged Maynard to seek counseling. One night, he bashed up his room with a hammer, and afterward she told him he had to leave. A pandemic moratorium meant Kate couldn\u2019t outright evict Maynard, and she still cared about him, so in the end she basically bribed him, giving him around $3,000 and a used Toyota SUV.<\/p>\n In September 2020, Maynard hit the road. He lived out of the car and continued to teach. He told me that no matter what others may imagine, he was content with his \u201cbeautiful life as a semi-homeless, partly employed sociology and criminology college professor.\u201d He moved up and down the West Coast, giving long, free-associative lectures from anywhere his phone could pick up a signal: a co-working space, a motel room, a campsite in the forest. Because the classes were all online, it was easy for him to pick up a second job teaching criminal-justice courses at Sonoma State University. Freed from supervision and the walls of the classroom, he would sometimes tape material for his courses as he drove.<\/p>\n Maynard uploaded one such video to YouTube that November, narrating a sunset drive through the scorched landscape left by a recent wildfire in southern Oregon. \u201cLook at the cars \u2014 they\u2019re melted,\u201d Maynard said as he panned his camera across the charred scene. The inferno, which destroyed 2,600 homes, had been attributed to arson. Investigators didn\u2019t know who had committed the crime. (It is still unsolved.) \u201cI\u2019m just doing this for research, trying to analyze the environment,\u201d Maynard said as he sat at a red light. As climate change made wildfires exponentially more dangerous, he said, there was an \u201cemerging field\u201d within criminology that sought to explain the arsonist mind-set.<\/p>\n \u201cWho does this?\u201d Maynard asked. \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n Within a year, Maynard would be accused of becoming an arsonist himself. In August 2021, law-enforcement agents apprehended him in a remote wooded area of Northern California, where, authorities alleged, he had applied his expertise to setting what one federal prosecutor described as an \u201cinsanely dangerous\u201d series of wildfires. None ended up causing much damage, but they occurred at the same time and in roughly the same area as the Dixie Fire, an accidental blaze that became one of the largest infernos in the history of the state. The tidy coincidence of Maynard\u2019s academic specialty turned his case into national news. \u201cExpert on Criminal Minds Is Accused of Wildfire Arson Spree,\u201d read the front-page headline in the New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n Since then, Maynard has been sitting in jail as he awaits trial. He has pleaded not guilty and contends that he has been miscast. He says he never could have committed such a senseless and destructive crime. He is a specialist in deviant behavior; he knows all the literature. \u201cI\u2019m a criminologist,\u201d he told me. \u201cI don\u2019t fit the profile.\u201d<\/p>\n Illustration: Hokyoung Kim<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nobody in California<\/strong> has sympathy for an accused firebug. After Maynard\u2019s arrest, he was held without bail at a county jail in Sacramento where the other inmates would make his life miserable, constantly trying to pick fights. He called the facility a \u201cdemonic hellhole.\u201d Still, for a criminology scholar, incarceration had some intellectual consolations. \u201cIf I wasn\u2019t in the middle of it, it would be fascinating,\u201d he told me by phone in October.<\/p>\n Maynard said his lawyer, a federal public defender, had instructed him not to speak to the press; neither she nor any of Maynard\u2019s family would comment for this article. But he was determined to defend his professional reputation. I\u2019d first written to him after his arrest, and in the following months he would call at unpredictable moments, sometimes in the middle of the night. He sent me long handwritten letters trying to explain how he had ended up in the woods. \u201cIt is always very difficult to describe yourself, for anyone at any time, even for narcissists (which I am not even though I study them),\u201d he began one missive, continuing, in characteristically run-on fashion, \u201cbut I will attempt to describe myself and my life in as much detail and overarching frame so people looking in from the outside can know me as a person and not just an accused arsonist.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in 1974, Maynard had a middle-class upbringing in a town outside Columbus, Ohio. He told me he grew up \u201cin the midst of rampant, soulless abuse\u201d and claimed he had been molested by two different people. \u201cMy high level of intelligence,\u201d he wrote, \u201cmade me odd, but very successful in school, and I quickly developed a deep love of learning and school which acted as a reprieve from the stark, empty and nearly loveless environment of abuse I faced.\u201d After he graduated from high school in 1992, he decided to go to college in faraway Alaska, \u201ca natural wonderland where wildlife and freedom was everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Maynard is one of those people for whom higher education is not just a life stage but a life in itself. He spent the next two decades cycling through schools and degree programs. At the University of Alaska\u2013Fairbanks, he earned a master\u2019s in political science and developed a love of theater, performing in a campus production of The Mikado.<\/em> Hoping to pursue acting, he moved to the New York area, studying for his second master\u2019s, in theater history, at Stony Brook University. He soon shifted his focus to sociology, applying his interest in drama to the study of the ways humans perform in everyday life.<\/p>\n He could be a classroom motormouth. \u201cYou\u2019d think he was kind of nuts,\u201d says Paul Bugyi, a friend and fellow doctoral student. \u201cIf you stop him and say, \u2018Clarify that,\u2019 his answer is usually kind of brilliant.\u201d Maynard wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the effect of neoliberal trade policies on global public health, but his true interests lay in wilder material. He was fascinated by the 20th-century clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, known as the \u201csleeping prophet,\u201d and once spent a year in his archives, researching his visions of the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Maynard taught classes on the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which ended in a firestorm. He also studied Jim Jones, the cult leader who committed mass suicide with 900 of his followers in 1978, and wrote a series of articles that suggested Jones exhibited traits of narcissistic personality disorder.<\/p>\n When we spoke, Maynard rejected any psychological interpretation of his interest in social deviance. He did acknowledge, however, that he thinks differently from others. He claims he has never been in therapy, but he has diagnosed himself with a variety of conditions, including Asperger\u2019s syndrome. \u201cI am not really sure it is a disorder,\u201d Maynard wrote me. \u201cI believe non-Asperger\u2019s people live in a world of dumbed down delusions and lies covered in formal conventions where they don\u2019t speak their mind.\u201d I wondered whether sociology might have offered him an analytical framework to understand how he ought to interact with others, something that can be a challenge for people on the autism spectrum. He scoffed at that, replying, \u201cI am more adept at understanding humans and society and reading emotions than almost anyone on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Maynard\u2019s career ambition was to become a professor with lifetime tenure, but his timing could hardly have been worse. Universities were giving out more doctorates than ever while hiring fewer of their holders for tenure-track positions. The annual competition for the small number of jobs was crushing. In 2013, Maynard managed to make the shortlist for a post at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He had a wobbly interview and gave what some faculty members recall as a memorably uncomfortable practice lecture. \u201cHe was extremely anxious,\u201d says H. Lyn Miles, a senior professor in the social, cultural, and justice studies department. \u201cHis legs were shaking, his toes were tapping.\u201d But he won over the department chair, got the job, and moved to Chattanooga that fall. (The chair declined interview requests.)<\/p>\n Maynard\u2019s friends at Stony Brook were worried. Grad school had provided a support structure, but he was fragile, and the publish-or-perish pressures of the tenure track could break anyone. Academic departments are practically constructed to be unmanageable, and Maynard\u2019s new workplace was in the midst of an internal conflict over its leadership and hiring. \u201cThe catchphrase a lot of my female colleagues and I used would be \u2018white guy with guitar,\u2019\u2009\u201d says Miles. Maynard fit the part.<\/p>\n Maynard told me he hated living in a small-minded city in Tennessee. The one person he connected with was a student named Satara Stratton. She was sort of famous, in a morbid way. As a teenager, Stratton had gone to Hollywood to become an actress and appeared in a few low-budget horror movies. Then she vanished. After a few months, someone dropped her off at an emergency room, suffering from a heroin overdose. The police suspected she had been living with a registered sex offender in a creepy old industrial building on Santa Monica Boulevard. Stratton claimed he had held her captive, shot her up with drugs unwillingly, and groomed her for sex trafficking. (The man was never charged.) She ended up telling her story on the true-crime-documentary series Disappeared.<\/em> At 24, she returned to Chattanooga to stay clean and began living with her mother, an adjunct anthropology professor.<\/p>\n Stratton was taking sociology and anthropology classes, and Maynard worked with her as a faculty adviser on a research project. He spent a lot of time at her mother\u2019s house. Her professors soon noticed a change in her behavior. Miles recalls that she turned in a class assignment that was nothing but a woozy silent film of Stratton walking through a forest.<\/p>\n One day in November 2014, Maynard was escorted from his office by campus police. \u201cHe was just gone,<\/em>\u201d recalls a former colleague. Stratton had made a sexual-harassment complaint against him and had told other professors that he had provided her with drugs. Maynard angrily confronted one of the professors who had reported the allegations to university authorities. The school convened a panel to investigate. Maynard denied making threats, said he had never given Stratton drugs, and claimed their relationship was not sexual. \u201cI haven\u2019t told her this before, but I am not sexually attracted to women,\u201d Maynard told the panel. \u201cI am gay, and \u2026 maybe she misconstrued what I did and what I said, and I\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n To me, Maynard described the relationship differently. \u201cWe dated, and probably we fit in a lot of ways,\u201d he said. He claimed he was the victim of \u201cfalse accusations\u201d made by others, not Stratton. \u201cPeople got in the way,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were jealous of our relationship.\u201d He acknowledged going through a \u201cbriefly terrible cocaine addiction\u201d after his mother\u2019s death in the mid-1990s but denied using drugs during the period he was with Stratton. He claims he was \u201ctrying to help\u201d Stratton overcome her own drug addiction. But Stratton\u2019s mother, Sharon, blames him for her daughter\u2019s relapse. \u201cShe was doing really well,\u201d she says, \u201cand then Maynard hit.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon after Stratton made her complaint to the university, she and Maynard reconciled and moved to Columbus. For years, her mother saved an unhinged-sounding voice-mail she says Maynard left her, warning her not to come after them. \u201cWhen he got in trouble with the university,\u201d Sharon Stratton says, \u201che went off the deep end.\u201d<\/p>\n Maynard launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance the publication of a book he claimed to be writing with Stratton. A cached record of the page says the working title was Heroin Princess: My Life As a Sex Slave and Heroin Addict.<\/em> On May 7, 2015, local Ohio police arrested Maynard after five witnesses reported he had choked Stratton on the street in the middle of the day. Maynard says he was \u201carguing very vociferously\u201d with Stratton about her continuing drug use but claims he never touched her violently. He ended up pleading down to a misdemeanor and was given a sentence of 60 days in jail, most of which was suspended. Stratton moved back to Chattanooga. In 2017, she died while visiting a friend in Los Angeles, most likely of a heroin overdose.<\/p>\n You can see<\/strong> all his handiwork,\u201d Kate said as she showed me Maynard\u2019s room. There were dimples in the floor and gashes in the walls. \u201cHammer,\u201d she said, pointing to one spot of \u201cGary damage,\u201d then another. \u201cHammer.\u201d<\/p>\n Kate has a freckled face and untamed hair dyed a flaming red. \u201cWhen he started having those violent outbursts, I realized he was ill,\u201d she said, sitting on the patio in her backyard, near the garden Buddha. \u201cBut I was trying to help him, and I was trying to understand because I realized that this is a person that has been kicked down in life wherever he has gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Maynard never told Kate about his meltdown at Chattanooga, but he did describe his difficulties in trying to make a living in academia afterward. He said he had been so broke that he was homeless at times, sleeping in offices, in his car, and even outdoors and going to university gyms to shower. \u201cI used to tell him, \u2018Gary, listen, this is not normal,\u2019\u2009\u201d Kate said. \u201c\u2009\u2018You have a Ph.D. and three master\u2019s. You should not be in this situation.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/pyxis.nymag.com\/v1\/imgs\/0c9\/2b4\/7afe9ecc30ea320dee2fc3a224dc9e2eab-1522FEA-Arson-57C88BF9-BE7A-47C6-81E4-FB.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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